Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Cooking reflects our humanity and ability to transform raw materials into sustenance.
This quote by Michael Pollan emphasizes the unique trait of cooking that distinguishes humans from other species. It suggests that the act of cooking is not just a means of nourishment but also a fundamental aspect of what makes us human, indicating our capacity for creativity, culture, and social connection that emerges from sharing and preparing food together.
Themes
CookingHumanityCreativityFoodCulture
In practice
Example use cases
During a culinary seminar, you might quote this to highlight the importance of cooking in human culture.
More from Michael Pollan
All quotes →You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it's a lot of sugar. It's just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.
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There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day.
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Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.
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[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
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He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
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